By Luther Weeks on April 22, 2019
Quite inclusive article from TIME: Robert Mueller Showed How U.S. Elections Broke in 2016. Here’s How to Fix Them <read>
Here’s what experts say would strengthen American elections against future attacks.
I fully agree, except possibly with one item on the list.
Posted in Electronic Vulnerability, National
By Luther Weeks on April 8, 2019
I recently read Bad Blood by John Carreyrou. I could not put it down. Not surprising since it has been on the NYTimes best seller list for months and its the only book I have noticed on Amazon with a full five star rating – with currently just over two-thousand reviews. But for me it was more than that. It brought back memories of a good portion of my career in the eighties and nineties, along with my last fifteen years concerned with electronic voting.
All reminiscent of Kurt Andersen’s book: Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. To me, just like the California Gold Rush, minus the gold.
Posted in Blockchain, Legislature 2019, National
By Luther Weeks on February 9, 2019
Do you need a public blockchain? The answer is almost certainly no. A blockchain probably doesn’t solve the security problems you think it solves. The security problems it solves are probably not the ones you have. …A false trust in blockchain can itself be a security risk. The inefficiencies, especially in scaling, are probably not worth it. I have looked at many blockchain applications, and all of them could achieve the same security properties without using a blockchain—of course, then they wouldn’t have the cool name.
Posted in Blockchain, Legislature 2019, National
By Luther Weeks on January 26, 2019
Not exactly person of the year or prisoner of the month, I did have my picture in Time Magazine! The occasion was the Rhode Island Risk Limiting Audit (RLA) where I participated last week.
Rhode Island wants to make sure their elections are protected from all sorts of problems, after a programming error in 2017 almost caused an incorrect result to be certified. The article contains some very good summaries of what what we and the Rhode Island Board of Elections were up to.
“Democracy and elections are only as good as whether people trust them or not,” [Secretary of State Nellie] Gorbea said. “Confidence in our democracy is critical to every other public policy issue.”…
Posted in Electronic Vulnerability, National, Post-Election Audits
By Luther Weeks on January 11, 2019
[The vendors] control the code in devices they sell. That means that technology we buy for one purpose can be reprogrammed without our consent or even our knowledge.
Posted in Electronic Vulnerability, National
By Luther Weeks on January 3, 2019
WhoWhatWhy: Will Georgia Double Down on Non-Transparent, Vulnerable Election Machines?
Georgia’s newly elected secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger (R), hopes to replace them not with hand-marked paper ballots and scanners (as virtually all independent cybersecurity election experts recommend), but rather with touchscreen ballot-marking devices,..In addition to security concerns, all touchscreen systems tend to cause long lines…The ExpressVote system also would cost taxpayers more than three times as much as hand-marked paper ballots and scanners:? an estimated $100 million as opposed to $30 million.
A system only greedy vendors and fraudsters would love.
******Update: Verified Voting Statement to Georgia
Posted in Costs, Electronic Vulnerability, National
By Luther Weeks on December 21, 2018
Story in Atlanta Journal-Constitution outlines what keeps election integrity awake all night: Georgia prepares to move from electronic to paper ballots .
State lawmakers broadly agree that it’s time to replace Georgia’s 27,000 direct-recording electronic voting machines with a system that leaves a verifiable paper trail.
With a paper ballot, recounts and audits could verify the accuracy of electronic tabulations.
But there’s disagreement about what kind of paper-based voting system Georgia should use and how much taxpayer money to spend on it…
It would be a sad shame if state and Federal money is spent to buy such risky equipment at triple the cost of voter marked paper ballots.
Posted in National, Our Editorials
By Luther Weeks on December 11, 2018
New study The study What Voters are Asked to Verify Affects Ballot Verification: A Quantitative Analysis of Voters’ Memories of Their Ballots
As a practical matter, do voters verify their BMD-printed ballot cards, and are they even capable of it? Until now, there hasn’t been much scientific research on that question…
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In a real polling place, half the voters don’t inspect their ballot cards, and the other half inspect for an average of 3.9 seconds (for a ballot with 18 contests!).
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When asked, immediately after depositing their ballot, to review an unvoted copy of the ballot they just voted on, most won’t detect that the wrong contests are presented, or that some are missing.
Posted in National, Reports
By Luther Weeks on November 5, 2018
Georgia Secretary of State, Brian Kemp, just launched an investigation of the Democratic Party of Georgia, after their consultant pointed out a serious vulnerability in Georgia’s voter registration system/database: Kemp’s Aggressive Gambit to Distract From Election Security Crisis
This touches Connecticut because the vendor for Georgia’s system, PCC, is located in Bloomfield Connecticut and supplies Connecticut’s voter registration and election night reporting systems. It is not certain that the reports so far accurately portray PCC’s role in Georgia and if any of the same vulnerabilities apply to the Connecticut’s system. From our understanding Connecticut has paid a lot of attention to the security of our voter registration system and that PCC supplies the software by is not involved in its operation. We have reached out to the Secretary of the State’s Office suggesting that they address the relevance of the Georgia report to Connecticut.
Posted in CT, Electronic Vulnerability, National
By Luther Weeks on October 18, 2018
New article from Newsweek: Here’s How Russia May Have Already Hacked the 2018 Midterm Elections <read>
They are talking about PA, but the same could apply to Connecticut:
Even though Bucks County’s Shouptronics aren’t wired, hackers have several ways of compromising them. The most direct and effective way would be to replace a computer chip in the machine that holds instructions on what to do when voters press the buttons with one that holds instructions written by hackers.
Posted in CT, Electronic Vulnerability, National
